When Windows Vista first hit market, some driver issues were to be
expected as hardware manufacturers moved existing components to the
new OS from Windows XP. As is natural for new items, the enthusiast
community was among the first to embrace the new operating system.

The incompatibilities were part due to Vista incorporating
Microsoft’s DirectX 10 promising better graphics and physics in PC
games. At the time, the high-end G80 graphics cards were some of the
most popular graphics cards on the market including the NVIDIA 8800
GTS, GTX, and Ultra.

NVIDIA had driver problems with of Vista and DirectX 10 from the
get go and delayed their first driver from a December 2006 release to
a January 2007 release. Even once the driver hit market, there were
wide spread reports of crashes because of NVIDIA drivers.

The problem with reports of buggy drivers is that no one can
really tell if the drivers are actually at fault, or if the computer
experiencing the driver crash has some other underlying problem
contributing to the crash.

As part of the ongoing Vista Capable class action lawsuit,
Microsoft released data on exactly what drivers caused the bulk of
logged Windows Vista crashes. The number one culprit of Vista crashes
related to driver failure was NVIDIA at 28.8%. Microsoft only broke
logged crashes out for a few companies including NVIDIA, Intel (8.8%)
and ATI (9.3%). Microsoft’s data shows that it was responsible for
17.9% of logged crashes.

The main early adopters of Vista were PC enthusiasts; the hardware
of choice for PC enthusiasts at the time was NVIDIA G80 GPUs so it
would be natural that more crashes would be logged as caused by a
NVIDIA driver. Ars Technica also points out that the Microsoft
data doesn’t specify if the crashes logged are from multiple
machines or a group of particularly error prone computers
experiencing multiple crashes.

Done, done, and done. Linux and the latest ATI drivers don't seem to get along though. I can't get my HD 3850 working properly.

I'm sure Vista works fine for a lot of people but I'm going to wait for it to mature first until I get it. XP gave me a lot of headaches but now it runs rock stable and Vista has nothing to offer me other than DX10.

They're releasing specs and helping developers create a new open source driver, but they aren't actually releasing their own drivers as open source. So the open ones are still at an early stage with only 2D working. Hopefully they'll be in pretty good shape by the end of the year.

Too bad the alky project has been dead for over 6 months. The last update on the news from that group was in august of last year. All they released was an alpha version of a program that allowed windowsvista only games to run on xp like halo2 and shadowrun.

Realistically, Vista only has one good year on it left before Windows 7 is ready to be released. I'm sure like "Windows 98 SE", Windows 7 will be that mature and stable version of Windows Vista with all the promises working properly that you're looking for. I'd say skip this generation of Windows Vista and check back again in a year for the latest news on Windows 7.

Vista rocks for me. I'm running one of my PC's on XP still but for me getting any new PC without Vista is silly. A decent computer with 2 gigs of RAM with Aero absolutely flies. Vista may take up more resources than XP, but it puts them to very good use.

My only complaints at all with Vista right now, is because i'm willfully running 64 bit and some things just flat up refuse to install.

I've got a bad driver on an HP laptop with no clean driver remove utility for Vista 64 every time I play a netflix stream vista BSOD's because of an NVIDIA driver crash. Completely locks up the computer and I have to do a cold restart to get it working again loosing anything unsaved. Of course the UDA doesn't apply to laptops so NVIDIAs latest drivers that might (or might not) fix the problem can't be installed.

Its very frustrating, the entire Vista experiance is frustrating and SP1 doesn't fix any of it.

NOTE: I have done this for both ati and nvidia, the process is similar. this isn't a guaranteed method by any means and may hinder or better performance as the method uses desktop drivers for mobile gpus, so power consumption may also be affected. I've just been doing this to try and fix issues ive had with old proprietary drivers and its worked every time FOR ME, but I've only done this on 2 computers. If you understand and read through the INF file you will eventually understand how the drivers are installed and may be able to resolve performance, power usage etc., but this guide will not show you how to do that, this is simply a "quick fix"

right click on "computer" in start menu, then click manage. in the left pane click on device manager, press the + on the "display adapters" item, right click on the nvidia ***** (whatever you have) and hit properties. click on the details tab and select hardware ids from the drop down box (should be first or second). it should say something like "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_****..." where *** * is a 4 digit hex code representing your graphics chip model. write that 4 digit number down.

now go to nvidia's website and download the latest driver for your graphics chip (nvidia 8 series for example) and pick any card in the list because the driver you download should include drivers for all cards of the same series. after its downloaded, run the installer once and make note of where it decompresses. it WILL give you an error saying a suitable driver could not be found or whatever. after this go to where the files decompressed and look for "nv_disp.inf". scroll down to a section where there are many lines that look similar to this:

the three digits after the %NVIDIA_ are the nvidia codenames for the gpu (like g80 and g92). do a quick google search with the 4 digit device code and the press name of the graphics chip (like 8600M GT) and see which gpu it falls under. now copy any line that has the same gpu and replace all DEV_**** parts in the line with DEV_(four digit code for you specific gpu) and add this to the end of the list. scroll down to the very bottom of the file now. this next part is optional but recommended. do a similar process with copying the line and replacing the dev code, but in the quotes you can either add the proper name of the graphics chip, or you can make up your own, like "billy bob's insanely BSODing gpu". again add this file to the end of the list. now save the file ( and make sure u save a copy of the original, save any important documents, and create a registry backup while your at it) and run the installer one more time, but make sure you don't overwrite ANY files. the installer should install a compatible driver and the many BSODs associated wit a buggy driver should now go away.

any comments please email me at dvblue88@aol.com (note i hate AOL, i only use this as a public email to give out, NOT as primary email....GO GMAIL (with imap!)).

Really? You must not have been a gamer back in the DOS days... I got to see all kinds of intersting messed up screens after DOS crashed in the middle of network play... Yes, my friends and I used to have lan parties using DOS!!! Duke Nukem, Red Alert and Redneck Rampage were the bomb!

I upgraded to Vista Ultimate the otehr night..Its been 3 days and i am still fighting with it just to keep it running longer then a day. It is EXTREMELY sensitive to software that gets installed. If it doesn't like it it completely barfs! and crashes.

Agreed. I have two computers with Vista now. The laptop has been more stable than with XP. The other machine had terrible problems, but it was mostly because it didn't have a Vista supported BIOS. Since flashing to the newer BIOS this year, it's also been stable.

The only compliants I have with Vista involve a lack of drivers (not completely MSFT's fault), and the extra RAM requirement (which is typical of any new software).